It turns out I was using my Hue lights wrong

Color-changing lights are a lot of fun, but it can be difficult to know the best way to use them in your home. Most smart lighting companies offer pre-designed scenes to help you light your space, but lights don’t know where they are physically located in your home, and that can dilute the effect. Philips Hue has a solution to this problem: SpatialAware.

SpatialAware knows the layout of your room and the placement of your Hue lights, so it can determine the best way to distribute a scene’s colors and effects across it.

It gets data when you scan your space using your smartphone in the Hue app. Using your phone’s augmented reality capabilities, the system can create a 3D model of placing Hue lights in your room.

It’s then stored as a map in the Hue app, and when you apply one of Hue’s newly redesigned scenes, it will intelligently distribute light based on where your bulbs and fixtures are located.

So, for a sunset scene, for example, lights on one side of the room will appear in warm yellow tones to mimic a sunset, while ceiling lights on the other side will have darker tones and colors.

The company reworked about half of its scenes to accommodate the new technology, coding each one to adapt to the new light placement data.

I saw a demo of SpatialAware in a hotel suite at CES this week, and it made me realize I’d been using smart lighting wrong all along.

The demo was held in a dining room filled with Hue ambient lighting products and Hue bulbs in overhead lighting, and showed the original scene, then the recreated scene.

As you can see in the video above, the lighting has been distributed in a more polished and integrated way in the redesigned version. “That’s because it’s actually being done the way the lighting designer intended,” says George Yanni, CTO and founder of Philips Hue.

The most noticeable difference is that the colors are evenly distributed. For example, all of the ceiling lights in the remastered savannah sunset scene are a soft orange glow, whereas in the original, a couple are orange and two are soft white, creating an eerie look.

In the Nightlight scene, the original version had the ceiling lights on, but the remastered version turns them all off, “because you don’t want the ceiling lights on in the nightlight scene,” says Yanni.

The new feature is coming in spring 2026 and is compatible with Hue connected lighting Hugh Bridge Pro.

Photos and video by Jennifer Pattison Toohey/The Verge